Rovner on the CIA and Afghanistan
Joshua Rovner has a thoughtful post up at The National Interest‘s The Skeptics today, and it reminded me to plug Josh’s book, and the event that we are hosting with him, Paul Pillar, and Mark Lowenthal on Monday, October 31st. It should be a terrific discussion. Details here.
Rovner’s blog post fits directly with the themes addressed in the book, but it also touches on something that I wrote about several months ago: would the appointment of David Petraeus as CIA Director subtly affect the agency’s assessment of progress—or lack thereof—in Afghanistan? Josh nicely summarizes the relevant concerns as Petraeus prepared to assume his new duties:
Petraeus was the public champion of the counterinsurgency doctrine that he claimed was necessary to defeat the Taliban and deliver stability to Afghanistan. How could he protect the objectivity of CIA analyses when he had such an obvious conflict of interest? Would he faithfully transmit analysts’ conclusions to policymakers, even if they implicitly criticized his approach to the war?
Petraeus addressed these concerns during his Senate confirmation hearings in June. “My goal has always been to ‘speak truth to power,’” he said, “and I will strive to do that as Director of the CIA.”
Rovner then explains what happened next, beginning last Thursday with Kim Dozier’s story for the AP that described a change in CIA analysis of Afghanistan that incorporated more information from military commanders on the ground. Citing a senior intelligence official, the story explained that ”Critics of the change say allowing the military more pushback will have a chilling effect on the analysts’ ability to give the war a failing grade.” Another “intelligence official expressed concern that this would institutionalize the former general’s habit when in Afghanistan of challenging the CIA’s unflattering conclusions.”
CIA officials denounced the report the following day, and Petraeus responded with a memorandum to all CIA employees on the AP story which, he said, “presents an inaccurate picture of my thoughts on the CIA’s Afghanistan analysis.” The change was made before Petraeus assumed duties as director, the memo explains, and it “will in no way undermine the objectivity of DI analysis on the war in Afghanistan. We will still ‘call it like we see it,’ but now with even better ground truth.”
The original story, and the CIA and Petraeus’s responses to it, have an air of “he said, she said” about them. Perhaps this was an honest attempt to improve the quality of intelligence from Afghanistan? Perhaps it was intended to shape the outcome in a more positive direction? Who knows? Rovner hones in on the essential question:
Take Petraeus at his word, accept his promises that he will not let vested interests affect his management decisions, and assume that the shift in the assessment process is not an attempt to manipulate intelligence. Is it still a good idea?
There is obvious value in incorporating military views into intelligence products. Field commanders can offer uniquely detailed views on the nature of the conflict. Continued fighting allows them to monitor enemy tactics as well as changes in the enemy’s level of effort. Their interaction with civilians also allows them to gauge public sentiment, at least at the local level. Done well, military assessments can paint a vivid portrait of the overall course of the war.
But assessments are not always done well. One reason is that they are inherently narrow. This is not to criticize: troops operating in a small area inevitably see the war through a soda straw. Nonetheless, they might conclude that trends in their own area are representative of larger trends throughout the country. Avoiding this problem requires methodical efforts to aggregate micro-level military perspectives into macro-level analyses while remaining cognizant of the serious analytical dangers involved.
Rovner concludes:
Accurate and timely intelligence will be critical as the Obama administration reconsiders what kinds of political outcomes are possible with a stripped-down force in Afghanistan. Integrating military views might lead to more comprehensive CIA assessments, but it might lead to more confusion if bad metrics are included for the sake of keeping estimates current. Hopefully the dust-up over the AP report will remind CIA officials to remain on guard against politicization, and to make sure that the changes in the assessment process do not lead to false optimism.
Has President Obama Given up on Changing U.S. Foreign Policy?
Today in Politico I have an op-ed titled “How Washington changed Obama.” In the piece, I argue that the recent appointments of Leon Panetta as secretary of defense and Gen. David Petraeus as director of the CIA, combined with revelations in the recent New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, suggest that President Obama has given up on changing U.S. foreign and defense policy:
Panetta is a dubious choice to fulfill Obama’s recent pledge to trim military spending. Any secretary charged with realizing that pledge would need extraordinary credibility with Capitol Hill Republicans, many of whom are determined to continue raining money on the Pentagon regardless of the nation’s parlous fiscal position. Despite having once been a Republican, Panetta ran for Congress as Democrat and has served prominently in Democratic administrations. He is unlikely to craft the pragmatic consensus needed to give the Pentagon a haircut.
Petraeus’s nomination poses a different problem. He has spent the past decade focused— at the behest of his commanders in chief — on what we used to call the “global war on terrorism.” But is U.S. nation-building in the Muslim world the most important national security and intelligence problem we face today?
[…]
The U.S. desperately needs to change its focus. We account for roughly half the world’s military spending, yet we feel terribly insecure. We infantilize our allies so that they won’t pay to defend themselves and instead allow us to do it for them. We stumble into small- and medium-sized foreign quagmires the way many people eat breakfast — frequently and without much thought.
Read the rest of the op-ed here.
Appointment of Panetta and Petraeus Signals More of the Same
The report that Leon Panetta will be appointed Secretary of Defense, and Gen. David Petraeus will become the new CIA director, does not come as a huge surprise. But I worry that President Obama’s decision to fill these positions from within his administration signals an unwillingness to rethink U.S. foreign policy. Such a reevaluation is desperately needed.
Leon Panetta brings some experience in national security affairs to DoD, including his stints at CIA and on Capitol Hill, and as a member of the Iraq Study Group. His more relevant experience, however, may be as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration. Bob Gates effectively shielded the Pentagon from spending cuts, but that merely postponed the reckoning that Panetta will have to confront.
Considerable cuts, beyond even the $400 billion-over-12-year target that President Obama announced earlier this month, will require a fundamental rethinking of the military’s role, something that Gates was unwilling to do. It remains to be seen whether Panetta will tackle this challenge, or whether he will defer to others within the administration.
A new role for the military and the United States would shed unnecessary missions, and relieve some of the burdens on our troops. In all likelihood, such a change must be directed from the Oval Office, not the Pentagon.
The appointment of Petraeus to head the CIA is puzzling. I worry that the appointment of a military officer to lead a civilian agency raises questions about Obama’s faith in senior leaders from within the CIA who might have moved into the top role.
The agency has questioned some of the rosier predictions of impending success in Afghanistan, and I hope that Petraeus’s move to Langley doesn’t result in a change of those candid assessments. More generally, Petraeus has focused nearly all of his energies over the past nine years trying to perfect the U.S. military’s ability to fight wars that most Americans now wisely oppose. His insights into future opportunities and challenges is unclear. We should be putting these wars that sap our nation’s strength and undermine our security in the country’s rearview mirror. Instead, Petraeus appears committed to a long-term nation-building mission in Afghanistan, and others like it.
Protests in Afghanistan: Our Excuse to Get Out
General David Petraeus, the head of American forces in Afghanistan, has emphasized the importance of winning the “hearts and minds” of Afghans by treating them and their culture with respect. Pentagon officials may want to reexamine that assumption, but not for the reason you might think.
Evangelical pastor Terry Jones, author of the book Islam Is of the Devil and head of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, two weeks ago carried through on his promise to “stand up” to Islam and burn a Quran. In response, crowds demonstrated in cities across Afghanistan, with a mob in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif storming a United Nations compound, killing eight non-American aid workers and beheading two of them.
The message from the protests is clear: this is war. Nevertheless, moral ambiguities emerge. When backed by over 130,000 International Security Assistance Force troops and close to 300,000 Afghan National Security Forces operating under foreign command, how are civilian aid workers being perceived by local Afghans? In the minds of the protesters, what crimes were they committing if they genuinely believed that they were defending their religious traditions and customs from infidels occupying their country? None of this should imply that the Quran burning or the grisly violence meted out against innocent aid workers was justified. If anything, they epitomize the war in Afghanistan’s two major problems.
First, they illustrate the discrepancy between the war of perceptions being waged abroad and the fearsome “Islamic menace” that our elected leaders continue to exploit back at home. Second, and perhaps more important, these incidents demonstrate the danger of America trying to forcibly export its liberal values onto illiberal societies.
U.S. policymakers have long believed that people around the world both want to adopt America’s liberal values, institutions, and practices, and that they should embrace them because those values embody the most enlightened and most civilized way of thinking. This universalist belief was aptly summarized by President George W. Bush in his 2002 West Point speech: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place…When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations.”
This way of thinking is profoundly flawed. The notion that moral truths should be singularly interpreted implicitly denies the differences between cultures. As prominent political science scholar Kenneth Waltz writes: “The powerful state may, and the United States does, think of itself as acting for the sake of peace, justice, and well-being in the world. But these terms will be defined to the liking of the powerful, which may conflict with the preferences and the interests of others.”
To argue that moral truths and values are the same in every culture allows policymakers to avoid serious questions about the consequences of intervention, including the inherent constraints of operating within a foreign culture. Even simple issues like the burqa—a billowy garment that covers a woman from head to toe—are still misunderstood in America. Whatever one thinks about the burqa (a symbol of oppression, institutionalized intolerance, etc.), it is more than a mere item of clothing; it reflects the ultra-conservative societal norms in which Afghan women live, many of whom do not have the freedom to look and act however they want.
Many well-meaning Americans believe that the United States, with its commitment to individual rights, political and religious freedom, and the rule of law, has a unique role to play in advancing Afghan human rights But the freedom Americans champion also entails one’s freedom to dissent. Does the West have the moral authority to punish Afghan traditionalists who reject our imposition of social transformation? What happens when attempts to reshape Afghan customs and belief systems incite violent rebellions, as they recently did in Mazar?
Recent events in Afghanistan should be a wake-up call to how our 10-year occupation is actually being perceived. Rather than winning “hearts and minds,” America’s civilizing mission has become increasingly associated with a Western cultural invasion.
Social Science Friday
Science!
A few odds and ends from the social science blogosphere:
- A rare Michael Kinsley stumble.
- The danger of data without theory.
- General David Petraeus will receive the Hubert H. Humphrey Award in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist at this year’s American Political Science Association annual meeting in Washington.
Robert Wright on Being–and Not Being–”Pro-Israel”
The U.S.-Israel relationship has been in the news a lot lately. First, Israel humiliates the American Vice President by announcing an expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem during his trip to that country. Then, Gen. Petraeus states in congressional testimony [.pdf] that the Israel/Palestine imbroglio “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” which in turn creates a dynamic where “Al Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”
For those with interest in the subject, Robert Wright’s piece on the New York Times’ website may be of interest. Wright looks at how chauvinistically Gary Bauer, Max Boot, and Abraham Foxman define “pro-Israel” and writes
If Israel’s increasingly powerful right wing has its way, without constraint from American criticism and pressure, then Israel will keep building settlements. And the more settlements get built — especially in East Jerusalem — the harder it will be to find a two-state deal that leaves Palestinians with much of their dignity intact. And the less dignity intact, the less stable any two-state deal will be.
As more and more people are realizing, the only long-run alternatives to a two-state solution are: a) a one-state solution in which an Arab majority spells the end of Israel’s Jewish identity; b) Israel’s remaining a Jewish state by denying the vote to Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, a condition that would be increasingly reminiscent of apartheid; c) the apocalypse. Or, as Hillary Clinton put it in addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference on Monday: “A two-state solution is the only viable path for Israel to remain both a democracy and a Jewish state.”
So, by my lights, being “pro-Israel” in the sense embraced by Bauer, Boot and Foxman — backing Israel’s current policies, including its settlement policies — is actually anti-Israel. It’s also anti-America (in the sense of ‘bad for American security’), because Biden and Petraeus are right: America’s perceived support of — or at least acquiescence in — Israel’s more inflammatory policies endangers American troops abroad. In the long run, it will also endanger American civilians at home, funneling more terrorism in their direction.
I have been and remain skeptical that Washington could successfully force a deal on the Israelis and Palestinians. To my mind, neither side seems willing to make the sorts of very painful concessions that would be necessary for peace. I think that the big problem the I/P dispute presents for the United States is less inherent in the conflict than it is in the fact that the United States has placed itself in a position, as George Kennan wrote, where “each [side] has the impression that it is primarily through us that its desiderata can be achieved, with the result that we are always first to be blamed, no matter whose ox is gored; and all this in a situation where we actually have very little influence with either party.”
But as long as we’re implicated in this sorry affair, we ought to be throwing our weight around to try to push both parties in the directions we think they ought to go. As Wright writes, smiling and nodding no matter what Israel does isn’t friendship.
Emanuel on TV and Filkins on McChrystal
A. It’s encouraging to see Rahm Emanuel and John Kerry saying that we shouldn’t up force levels in Afghanistan without a reliable partner. But if we shouldn’t send 40,000 more troops to prop up a crooked government, why keep the 68,000 we have there? A focused counter-terrorism mission would require far less than that.
B. According to Dexter Filkins’ article in the New York Times Magazine, the war in Iraq taught General Stanley McChrystal the following:
No situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable — if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.
What’s interesting about this claim is its utter confidence in the potential efficacy of US military power — it is not just necessary to solving Iraq’s problems, but sufficient. If this view is right, Iraqis themselves, and their civil war, were unnecessary to the limited political reconciliation that occurred there.
Filkins, surprisingly, seems to agree, depicting the evolution of the war this way:
For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded. By refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters — the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening — while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.
Note the use of the word “then” preceding the sentence about peace deals. It carries a heavy load. Filkins wants to say that the hearts and mind theory of counterinsurgency caused the Anbar Awakening. But he offers no real causal story about how they are connected; he just says that one happened and then the other.
Another view, one that leaves Iraqis some agency, is that the growth of the al Qaeda Iraq and the progress of the civil war changed the Sunni insurgents’ strategic calculus, such that they decided to cooperate with Americans to gain locally. And that in turn, limited violence. U.S. forces had a role in this — the covert killing campaign that McChrystal led and Filkins chronicles probably pressured insurgents and weakened AQI, for one. But the deals — the awakening — began well before the troop surge and before David Petraeus took command and tried to implement a new counterinsurgency doctrine. The key American decision was willingness to play ball with insurgent groups. This decision had little to do with winning hearts and minds via population security and increased troop levels. And by empowering forces at odds with the central government, it contradicted the goal of state-building in Iraq, at least in the short-term.
I obviously agree with the latter view. Our dependence on local politics limits what we can accomplish in counterinsurgency. We can certainly affect what happens in Afghanistan, but it is hubris to think we control it.
Filkins also quotes McChrystal on Afghanistan’s effect on Pakistan:
“If we are good here, it will have a good effect on Pakistan,” he told me. “But if we fail here, Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems — it would be like burning leaves on a windy day next door.
It’s sensible to conclude chaos nearby is unhelpful to stability in Pakistan, but it goes way too far to say that Afghanistan’s stability is necessary to Pakistan’s, which has been fairly stable for long periods while Afghanistan was not. What’s more, as Robert Pape argues, it is likely that U.S. forces are a cause of insurgency in both countries.
David Brooks Is Confused about Counterinsurgency
Would you buy a state-building mission from this man?
Today David Brooks (in the role of Teddy Roosevelt) debates George Will (as Edmund Burke) on the subject of Afghanistan without citing him. This debate marks a high point of conservative politics where neoconservative ideology appears in concrete clarity.
First, Brooks makes clear that he is not interested in merely managing the problem of terrorism, but rather in “prevailing” in the war in Afghanistan. He argues that “only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success,” but then proceeds to absurdly define population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine as one in which “small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.”
Either Brooks is being cute here or demonstrating his ignorance. With one word — “small” — Brooks has utterly mischaracterized what counterinsurgency is all about.
Population-centric counterinsurgency is all about large numbers of American men and women, not small numbers. The promoters of COIN in Afghanistan have recently taken to including the Afghan National Army in the count of counterinsurgents, but the textbook — and as a result, obviously oversimplified — number of counterinsurgents you’d want in a place with a population, dysfunctional national government, and geography like Afghanistan pushes well up to around half a million. It is an extraordinarily resource- and labor-intensive endeavor. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll take David Petraeus or David Kilcullen as authorities on the matter.
Brooks pushes his argument further, declaring that we possess only two choices in Afghanistan: “surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building.” One paragraph later, Brooks writes of the fight against terrorism that “we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve.” That Brooks does not recognize the conflict between these views is telling. See Rory Stewart for more on the swashbuckling certainty like what Brooks is displaying.
Making Enemies in Afghanistan
Yaroslav Trofimov’s article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal explains how Ghulam Yahya, a former anti-Taliban, Tajik miltia leader from Herat, became an insurgent. The short answer: because the American master plan in Afghanistan required the retirement of warlords. The trouble is that in much of Afghanistan “warlord” is a synonym for “local government.” Attacking local authority structures is a good way to make enemies. So it went in Herat. Having been fired from a government post, Ghulum Yahya turned his militia against Kabul and now fires rockets at foreign troops, kidnaps their contractors, and brags of welcoming foreign jihadists. Herat turned redder on the color-coded maps of the “Taliban” insurgency.
That story reminded me of C.J. Chivers’s close-in accounts of firefights he witnessed last spring with an army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley. According to Chivers, the Taliban there revolted in part because the Afghan government shut down their timber business. That is an odd reason for us to fight them.
One of the perversions of the branch of technocratic idealism that we now call counterinsurgency doctrine is its hostility to local authority structures. As articulated on TV by people like General Stanley McChrystal, counterinsurgency is a kind of one-size-fits-all endeavor. You chase off the insurgents, protect the people, and thus provide room for the central government and its foreign backers to provide services, which win the people to the government. The people then turn against the insurgency. This makes sense, I suppose, for relatively strong central states facing insurgencies, like India, the Philippines or Colombia.
But where the central state is dysfunctional and essentially foreign to the region being pacified, this model may not fit. Certainly it does not describe the tactic of buying off Sunni sheiks in Anbar province Iraq (a move pioneered by Saddam Hussein, not David Petraeus, by the way). It is even less applicable to the amalgam of fiefdoms labeled on our maps as Afghanistan. From what I can tell, power in much of Afghanistan is really held by headmen — warlords — who control enough men with guns to collect some protection taxes and run the local show. The western idea of government says the central state should replace these mini-states, but that only makes sense as a war strategy if their aims are contrary to ours, which is only the case if they are trying to overthrow the central government or hosting terrorists that go abroad to attack Americans. Few warlords meet those criteria. The way to “pacify” the other areas is to leave them alone. Doing otherwise stirs up needless trouble; it makes us more the revolutionary than the counter-revolutionary.
On a related note, I see John Nagl attacking George Will for not getting counterinsurgency doctrine. Insofar as Will seems to understand, unlike Nagl, that counterinsurgency doctrine is a set of best practices that allow more competent execution of foolish endeavors, this is unsurprising. More interesting is Nagl’s statement that we, the United States have not “properly resourced” the Afghan forces. Nagl does not mention that the United States is already committed to building the Afghan security forces (which are, incidentally, not ours) to a size — roughly 450,000 — that will annually cost about 500% of Afghanistan’s budget (Rory’s Stewart’s calculation), which is another way of saying we will be paying for these forces for the foreseeable future.
It probably goes too far to say this war has become a self-licking ice-cream cone where we create both the enemy and the forces to fight them, but it’s a possibility worth considering.
Pakistan’s Critical Hour
I’m sympathetic to Ahmed Rashid’s arguments expressed in today’s Washington Post. The Pakistani journalist argues that President Obama’s plan to dedicate $1.5 billion annually to Pakistan in non-military spending “will also affect America’s image in Pakistan and the region.” However, I’m having trouble with his previous point: “The speed and conditions with which Congress provides emergency aid to Islamabad will affect the Pakistani government and army’s ability and will to resist the Taliban onslaught.”
For many years, the U.S. government has shoveled billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan (almost $20 billion since 9/11). Certainly in the tribal areas, non-military aid directed to education and comprehensive study programs can help to mitigate the spread of militancy among younger generations. But a coherent distribution mechanism must be in place or else no one in Pakistan will benefit. Given the problems of corruption and mismanagement afflicting the distribution of military aid, why should we expect the distribution of non-military aid to be more effective? Besides, there is very little Washington can do to “affect” Pakistan’s “will” to resist the Taliban. Ahmed Rashid, General Petraeus, and many others are correct to conclude that to be truly effective at combating internal insurgencies, Pakistan must re-orient its military away from conventional threats-such as India-and toward the low-intensity guerilla insurgency the army is presently ill-equipped and poorly trained to fight. But before Pakistan gains the capability to attack insurgents they must first find the willingness to do so.
With regards to the general alarm about militant incursions into valleys outside of Swat, this is certainly warranted. Militants have burned down or blown up over 200 schools, beheaded opponents, and forces tens of thousands to flee. But like I mentioned to my good friend and colleague, Ed Crane, the Taliban have no F-16s, no tanks and no means of taking over a country of 172 million people. India was certainly instrumental in the break up of Pakistan in 1971. But even India failed to conquer a large part of West Pakistan or takeover the country entirely. Granted, these militants are scary folks, but we need a bit of nuance on the whole “Pakistan is imploding” meme coursing through the Beltway. As I elaborate here, “Balkanization” of Pakistan, which I foresee as a distinct possibility, is much different then seeing the complete collapse of civilian and tribal administration.
Also, if America is worried about Pakistan’s imminent demise, U.S. policymakers and defense planners must understand that the coalition’s presence in Afghanistan threatens to further destabilize Pakistan. The vast majority of Pakistanis are not radical. But the spread of tribal militias in the northwest, tens of thousands of refugees (and certainly some militants) fleeing into major cities from aerial drone strikes, and widespread distrust of America’s intentions in the region, all place undue stress on a nation already divided, weak and fragile. As I argue in my recent policy analysis:
President Obama remains unequivocal in his commitment to continue airstrikes. But he and his policy planners must recognize that continuing airstrikes will undermine the authority of President Zardari, as well as Obama’s ability to coordinate policies effectively with Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders. The president’s national security team must understand that the struggle against extremism would best be waged by bolstering Islamabad’s ability to compete with militants for political authority in FATA. If his administration simply increases attacks from pilotless drones, it will only push more wavering tribes further into the Taliban camp, continue his predecessor’s policy of dictation, rather than cooperation, and undermine the perception within the Pakistani body politic that Obama can change U.S. policy toward the Muslim world.
Aside from ceasing aerial drone strikes, another way to help America’s image is in the region is for prominent U.S. decision-makers to stop publicly speculating about the fate of their democracy, as Petraeus did last week. America has a history of sponsoring insurgents, financing coups, and funding internal dissidents against democratically-elected leaders. Regardless of intent, Washington is perceived as being blatantly manipulative and endorsing a military takeover when we make reckless statements like this.
Pundit Predilection: Reading a Lot into a Little
American policymakers have a tendency to ignore the viewpoints of other nations. Such was the case when Gen. David Petraeus complained that Pakistan saw India rather than the Taliban as the more significant security threat. I made the simple but still important (in my view, anyway) point that Pakistan had reason to fear India, including the latter’s role in detaching East Pakistan from what had been a geographically divided state.
Yet there appears to be predilection by some pundits to read a lot into a short blog post. Matthew Yglesias apparently believes that to point to India’s role in the 1971 war is to gloss over Pakistan’s ignoble conduct in what became Bangladesh. Others may have seen “a happy Pakistan bouncing along” until victimized by a “rapacious” India, but my post said nothing of the sort. In fact, in contrast to Mr. Yglesias, I was alive during the war and remember stories about Pakistani atrocities.
Nevertheless, the point remains: there is a reason leading Pakistanis fears India more than the Taliban and other extremists. And lecturing them that they are misguided, that Pakistan’s artificial geographic and social configuration was doomed and that the Khan government’s brutality gave India good cause for intervening, is not likely to change the current threat assessment of those in power, especially in the military. So the point remains: Washington policymakers have to deal with rather than dismiss Islamabad’s fears.
Solving Our Problem in Pakistan
Pakistan has nuclear weapons, an active jihadist movement, a weak civilian government, a history of backing the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a military focused on fighting another American ally, India. Pakistan probably is harder than Iraq to “fix.”
Unfortunately, the gulf between the U.S. and Pakistani governments is vast. Starting with the respective assessments of the greatest regional threat, Gen. David Petraeus has given Islamabad some unwanted advice. Reports AP News:
The United States is urging Pakistan’s military to focus more on the Taliban and extremists advancing inside their borders instead of the nation’s longtime enemy — India.
The top U.S. commander in the region told Congress Friday that extremists already inside Pakistan pose the greatest threat to that nation.
Gen. David Petraeus (pet-TRAY’-uhs) was asking a House Appropriations subcommittee for funding to help the Pakistani military root out and stop insurgents, saying he wants Pakistani leaders to realize they need to learn how to fight internal extremists.
Petraeus called India a “conventional threat” that should no longer be Pakistan’s top military focus.
Gen. Petraeus is obviously right, from America’s standpoint. But try explaining that to Pakistan, which has fought and lost three wars with India. Indeed, Pakistan was dismembered in one of those conflicts, leading to the creation of Bangladesh.
Enlisting Pakistan more fully in combating the Taliban and al Qaeda will require recognizing, not dismissing, Islamabad’s other security concerns. Squaring the circle won’t be easy. But doing so will require more creative diplomacy and less preemptive demands, more regional cooperation and less military escalation.
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